Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538148
Fall 2025 – LOCAL695.COM 29 Seth Rogen, Catherine O'Hara, and Zoe Kravitz at the Golden Globes village/command center would be hidden away inside the house for the entirety of the shot. We knew that we could zone cover the action by placing a bag rig in the convertible's trunk to record the actors over the course of the long drive. As the car parks in the front driveway, the actors will come into range of my set antennas and I will be able to play the entire walk and talk, and video village portion from my cart. The puzzle to solve would be getting any kind of Comtek or IFB feed for the director's village inside the house from the moving car, at such a great distance. I conferred with Video Playback Operator Alfie and found out that he had been in contact with Greg "Noodles" Johnson, owner at RF Film Inc. If you work in Hollywood and need to get an RF signal from point A to point B, Noodles is the go-to guy. Alfie was planning to use Noodles' long-range modified Wave Central transmitter system called a "PICO" to broadcast image from the car up to the house. I checked with his transmitter technician and Local 695 RF Operator Shan Siddiqi, and learned that the system was capable of transmitting embedded audio. We would therefore feed a mix track from the bag rig to the PICO transmitter mounted on the hero car. The transmitter would then send the picture and embedded audio to Shan's receiver at set, at which point Alfie would pull his video signal for monitors, and I would pull the mix track audio signal to a channel on my Cooper CS208 mixing board. This allowed me to record the car driving dialog mix track simultaneously from the beginning of the take at my cart in the house, redundant to the bag rig recording in the car. It would also give me a clean signal for Comteks, IFB's, and camera comms at the house from the start of the shot. It was one of the few instances where sound and image capture were truly working in sync. The system worked flawlessly and from the sound perspective was nearly fail-proof operationally. If the PICO signal dropped Additionally, a great captain like Doug Weaver understands the significance of the pecking order as to who lands at set and when. This would never be more crucial than in The Studio. Not only were many of these locations very difficult to get in and out of, they were also chosen for their magnificent 360° views of the city. Once you got to these sleek mid-century modern houses of glass, there was very little room to hide anything.